“One Zug after another marches out into the country…”
“Two or three times a year, there are ‘maneuvers’ lasting about a week, when the school marches from place to place (the senior boys sometimes cover well over twenty miles a day), and set up their tents from tent sheets carried by each boy. A lorry and field kitchens accompany them. In September of last year, all the twelve schools were engaged together in operations for the first time….”
We cannot inquire how far the parents of the “Junkers” are in accord with their education; for the boys, too, are “expropriated,” and the parents have no chance to object, or to show anything but silent acquiescence.
Reports of protests about the schools have found their way into the outer world from various districts of Germany, and especially from the Catholic districts. The population has been aroused again and again when the Nazis have removed the crucifixes from the religious schools to replace them with photographs of Hitler and with the swastika. In the Bishopric of Minister, there was a historic peasant demonstration, terrifying in its complete monotony and insistence. No one spoke for hours, there was no shouting of slogans during this demonstration; there was nothing but the continual murmur of one word coming from all the people gathered. The crowd stood there, murmuring the word: “Crosses, crosses, crosses…” without interruption, for hours, “…crosses, crosses…” In this single instance, the Nazis surrendered. They returned the crosses to the diocese. In almost every other place, they were victorious, for almost nowhere else did they meet with opposition.
* * *
The German schools, then, highly respected throughout the world, until 1933, for their thoroughness, their responsibility, and their progressiveness — the schools that held so much hope for the future cannot now be compared with any other educational institutions. Graduates of Gymnasien used to receive an education which brought them to the level of the sophomore or junior year of an American college; today they are beneath the intellectual standard of the young Americans who have just passed College Entrance Examinations. Graduates of French Lycées or Swiss Grammar Schools are justified in their contempt for German students who can do nothing but march.
The astonishing thing now is that there are occasional deploring voices, no matter how careful and ambiguous. A Studienrat named Nasshofen openly expresses his disillusion in the N. S. Educator: “It is a matter for deep regret that the school material, especially in graduate and high school work… in no wise coincides with the demands made upon the education received by those open to future choice as Führers. In the interest of our people, this must not continue…. In many cases, no one dares to proceed with the necessary energy and to draw the obvious conclusions.”
We know why no one dares; any bad pupil reprimanded by a conscientious teacher might denounce him for some fantastic crime, merely for “injuring the National Socialist spirit,” or, indeed, for belittling the Führer. No one dares, because the risk is loss of livelihood and even of life.
“Let us have the courage,” the Studienrat demands, in a manner that can only be described as foolhardy, “to go ahead and dismiss a number of ‘definitely inept’ pupils!”
Before the Nazi regime, we could not have pictured a school that simply did not dare to require a scholastic standard from its pupils, and that did not have the courage to dismiss failures, but that substituted for courage the audacity to lie and ignore, to preach inhumanity as prime virtue, and to send out soldiers instead of human beings and citizens. Even today, these schools are unthinkable as permanent sources of German education. Five years are a short time in the history of a country; even ten years are not very much. The wounds that the Führer has inflicted upon the German people are very terrible, their scars may long be visible, worn on every forehead like a mark of Cain — but some day all those gifts of character and spirit which have won sympathy for the German people in the past must come again into their own.